what is kinship all about[edicao redigitalizada]

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL READER

E d i t e d by R o b e r t P a r k i n a n d

L i n d a S t o n e

foJS&a-W'li& 'faT 'L

Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural AnthropologySeries Editor: Parker Shipton, Boston University

Series Advisory Editorial Board:Fredrik Barth, University of Oslo and Boston UniversityStephen Gudeman, University of MinnesotaJane Guyer, Northwestern UniversityCaroline Humphrey, University of CambridgeTim Ingold, University of AberdeenEmily Martin, Princeton UniversityJohn Middleton, Yale EmeritusSally Falk Moore, Harvard EmeritaMarshall Sahlins, University of Chicago EmeritusJoan Vincent, Columbia University and Barnard College Emerita

Drawing from some of the most significant scholarly work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology series offers a comprehensive and unique perspective on the ever-changing field of anthropology. It represents both a collection of classic readers and an exciting challenge to the norms that have shaped this discipline over the past century.

Each edited volume is devoted to a traditional subdiscipline of the field such as the anthropology of religion, linguistic anthropology, or medical anthropology; and provides a foundation in the canonical readings of the selected area. Aware that such subdisciplinary definitions are still widely recogni2ed and useful - but increasingly problematic - these volumes are crafted to include a rare and invaluable perspective on social and cultural anthropology at the onset of the twenty-first century. Each text provides a selection of classic readings together with contemporary works that underscore the artificiality of subdisciplinary definitions and point students, researchers, and general readers in the new directions in which anthropology is moving.

1 Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader Edited by Alessandro Duranti

2 A Reader in the Anthropology o f Religion Edited by Michael Lambek

3 The Anthropology o f Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique Edited by Joan Vincent

4 Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader Edited by Robert Parkin and Linda Stone

What Is Kinship All About?

David M. Schneider

We are here to celebrate the centenary of Morgans Systems, and the topic I have chosen for this occasion is What Is Kinship All About. Let us look at the one who began it all and ask what he thought kinship was all about.1

I need not remind you that Morgan was concerned to discover the history and origin of the Indians of North America. He believed that he could reconstruct their history and locate their origins by their manner of classifying kinsmen. He argued that it was not the words or the language that could be taken as reliable indices but rather the mode of classification regardless of the words or language used.

, .' Morgans reasoning was that if the system of relationship of consanguinity should be found to be the same among all the Indians of Amer-

Jca and should also be shown to be the same as : those from India, then it would follow that the - .Indians of America brought that system with ^ them from Asia. Why? Because it is a system

({Which is transmitted with the blood (1871:4). {{By blood" Morgan meant precisely what we V rown; genetics and biology. He says elsewhere

book: In the systems of relationship of great families of mankind, some of the

memorials of human thought and ex- fc j^ n c e are deposited and preserved. They ^ p e been handed down as transmitted systems ;iriirough the channels of the blood, from the liplP?31 ages of mans existence upon the

^Ut revea^nS certain definite and pro

gressive changes with the growth of mans experience in the ages of barbarism (1871:vi).

What did the mode of classification show? How did it come about? What did it reflect? Morgans answer was: The actual biological facts as these were known or knowable, given the state o f knowledge o f the group on the one hand and the state o f marriage and sexual relationship on the other, at the time the classification first was established.

In Morgans own words:

The family relationships are as ancient as the family. They exist in virtue of the law of derivation, which is expressed by the perpetuation of the species through the marriage relation. A system of consanguinity which is founded upon a community of blood, is but the formal expression and recognition of these relationships. Around every person there is a circle or group of kindred of which such person is the center; and the Ego, from whom the degree of the relationship is reckoned and to whom the relationship itself returns. Above him are his father and mother and their ascendants, below him are his children and their descendants; while on either side are his brothers and sisters and their descendants and the brothers and sisters of his father and of his mother and their descendants as well as a much greater number of collateral relatives descended from common ancestors still more remote. To him they are nearer in degree than ocher individuals of the nation at large. A formal arrangement of

253 DAVID M. SCHNEIDER

the more immediate blood kindred into lines of descent, with the adoption of some method to distinguish one relative from another and to express the value of the relationship, would be one of the earliest acts of human intelligence [1871:10].

And so M organ called the descriptive system a natural system precisely because it is founded upon a correct appreciation o f the distinction between the lineal and several collateral lines and o f the perpetual divergence of the latter from the former. Each relationship is thus specialized and separated from every o ther in such a m anner as to decrease its nearness and diminish its value according to the degree of distance of each person from the central Ego (1871:142-143). Conversely, the classificatory system , as it is used am ong American Indians and others, M organ said, is contrary to the nature o f descents, confounding relationships which are distinct, separating those which are sim ilar and diverting the stream s of the blood from the collateral channels into the lineal. W here, for the descriptive system, knowledge o f the lines of parentage is necessary to determine the classification, just the opposite is true for the classificatory system; a knowledge of parentage is quite unnecessary. It is impossible to explain its origin on the assum ption of the existence of the family founded upon m arriage between single pairs; but it may be explained w ith some degree of probability on the assum ption of the antecedent existence of a series of customs and institutions, one reform atory of the other, commencing w ith prom iscuous intercourse and ending with the establishm ent of the family, as now constituted, resting on m arriage between single pairs (paraphrased from 1871:143):

It will prove useful for us to keep tw o parts of M organs paradigm distinct from each other. One is the mode of classification itself. The other is the m anner in which the mode of classification can be established, that is, by means of the analysis o f the kinship terminology.

M organs paradigm states that the m ode of classification of kinsmen derives from the knowledge of how people are actually genetically or biologically related to each other. This knowledge in turn depends on their form of marriage. Hence for M organ, as for others

-M

since, m arriage is the central insticiitioq kinship. Im plicit in this part of Morgan's digm is the prem ise th a t marriage c o n s is t sexual relationship between male and It is the processes of biological reprodu^ th a t m ake the m arried pair the parenti^pf^- their biological offspring and the offspring^f^ such a m ated pair are siblings. The links w ji i^ are recognized o r m arked in the mode of sification of kinsm en are the biological or gen.' etic links am ong these people as these m a fc p || know n, which in turn depend on the mo'ded ^ m arriage. T hus, by taking one male and ongf't female in the abstract and tracing their siblings^ their parents, their offspring, and the p a r e n t^ siblings, offspring, and spouse of each of th e * g | it is possible to create a genealogical grid, as ipf.;. is called today; the particu lar c lassification#^ kin w hich a particular people use can bitm apped on this grid and com pared with other classifications w hich o ther people use by comparing the differently partitioned grids. The classification, in turn , can be derived from which positions on the genealogy are grouped together and which positions are distinguished.

. . . [I]t seemed obvious to M organ that the _ m ode o f classification could be read directly from the kinship terminology; tha t is, those positions on the genealogical grid which were grouped together under one kinship term could be distinguished from those positions on the genealogical grid grouped under a different kinship term and so on. H ence kinship terminology was the key to the m ode of classification and in fact, practically the only key, since the kinship terms m eant (either only or primarily) specific relationships of blood or marriage. The taxonom y, then, was derived from no other source than the kinship terminology.

W hat was kinship all abou t for Morgan, then? Kinship was about the way in which a people grouped and classified themselves as com pared w ith the real, true, biological facts o f consanguinity and affinity. The facts of consanguinity m ean those persons w ho are related by biological descent from the same ancestor The facts of affinity are the facts of marriage, and m arriage means the sexual, reproductive relationship between male and female.

M cLennan took issue w ith M organ on one specific score, and his argum ent is easy to misunderstand if one does no t observe it closely.

W H A T IS KINSHIP ALL ABOUT? 259

T h e . . . m istake, or rather I should say error, was to have so lightly assumed the system to be a system of blood-ties (1886:269).

For the following reasons I think that assumption was an error:-(l) itis apparent, on the slightest inspection of Mr. M organs tables, that son and daughter, in the classificatory system, do not mean son or daughter begotten by or bom to; that brother and sister are terms which do not imply connection by descent from the same mother or father; and that mother does not mean the bearing mother. From the analogies of the case, we must believe that father does mean the begetting father. . . . These facts surely ought to have strongly suggested that the classificatory system cannot be a system of blood-ties at a l l . . . [1886:270]. (2) That the classificatory system is a system of mutual salutations merely, appears from many of its peculiar features. For one thing, the names for relationship are framed for use in address. They want generality [McLennan 1886:270, 273].This, then, is w hat M cLennan said KINSHIP

TERMS were all about; they were courtesies and modes of address, o f m utual salutation.

But did M cLennan differ w ith M organ on what KINSHIP was all about? N o t a bit!

all, or almost all, the peoples using a form of the classificatory system have, besides, some well-defined system of blood-ties the system

which traces blood-ties through women only, or some other. It is inconceivable that any

> people should have at the same time two en- ...i. tirely different systems of blood relationship.

And it may be confidently affirmed that in : i every case it is the system which is unquestion-

^(-^ably a system of blood-ties, and not the classi- v (katory system, that alone is of practical force V{ '.'>V ilr which regulated succession, for instance, to

;h nours or estates. . . . W hat duties or rights i - (^ .^e affacted by the relationships comprised of i classificatory system? Absolutely none.

are barren of consequences, except '^Srmdeed as comprising a code o f courtesies and ^^S^faonial addresses in social intercourse

1886:270-273].

^M cL ennan as well as fo r M organ , kin- about m arriage, ab o u t the facts o f

?r?non and conception, ab o u t blood-ties relationships as they could be

IT were know able, a b o u t the ties th a t

arise ou t of the biological facts of hum an reproduction; for McLennan, rights and duties, succession and estates followed blood-ties, not kinship terms. For both M organ and McLennan, marriage m eant a sexual relationship between male and female; consanguinity meant descent from the same ancestor. These are the only two components that are necessary for the construction of a genealogy, that is, for the construction of the analytic apparatus needed to describe any particular mode of classification or kinship system and to compare it w ith any other system.2

Ever since M organs Systems, anthropologists have followed this basic paradigm in its essential outline and have continued to argue about the meaning of kinship terms as well. For m any since then, like Durkheim and Rivers, the notions o f paternity and maternity and blood connection had to be taken in their social and no t in their biological meanings; indeed, their social and their actual biological senses did not always accord w ith each other too well. Sometimes these biological relationships are either presum ptive, fictive, errors of fact based on ignorance, o r putative rather than empirically dem onstrable. But this hardly alters the fact th a t it is the system of w hat are socially defined as the biological facts of reproduction that kinship is all about. T h a t there are rights and duties, statuses and roles, and interpersonal relationships o f different complexions associated w ith the genealogically defined kinship relationships has always been agreed; but the two have been kept quite distinct and held to be inherently distinguishable so tha t the defining feature, the definition o f a kinship relationship as against any other kind of relationship, has alw ays been the biological aspect, whether treated as pure biology or as the social definition of w hat biology is. Indeed, the prevailing view since M organ has been tha t the fictive or presum ptive o r undem onstrable biological relationship, the social aspect itself, is modeled after, or is a m etaphorical extension of, or is a social accretion to, the defining and fundam ental biological relationship. Thus for instance adoption is n o t ruled outside the kinship system bu t is understandable as a kind of kinship relationship precisely in terms o f the fact th a t it is m odeled after the biological relationship. W ithou t the biological relationship, in this


view, adoption makes absolutely no sense. Hence even if it is in its social aspects, and even if it is as a social relationship that anthropologists are concerned with it, the real, actual, and true facts of biology as they concern human reproduction remain the base and the defining feature of kinship.3

A variant of this view, which is not fundamentally different from it is the position that the genealogical grid itself, can be treated as the defining feature, regardless of how the specific genealogical relationships themselves may be defined and even when they are not defined in biological terms at all. Thus whatever the theory of procreation may be for a given people, it is the fact that a system of genealogical-like relations can be mapped out and partitioned into categories, each systematically related to the other which is the crucial and defining feature of kinship. Yet however different this position may seem to be at first glance it boils down to the fact that a paren t- child relationship - however that may be defined procreatively - obtains which implies a sibling relationship which implies a sexual relationship between parents, and so on, which creates the genealogy. By definition, of course, no genealogy is formed or can be formed from the exchange of morning greetings or salutations, nor can a genealogical grid be constructed from material other than some set of premises about the nature of human reproduction.

The two sides of kinship, the biological model (whether real or presumptive, putative or fictive) and the social relationship (the rights, duties, privileges, roles, and statuses) stand in a hierarchical relationship to each others for the biological defines the system to which the social is attached, and is thus logically prior to the latter. If two relationships are precisely the same except for one single feature, that one is the kinship relationship where some biological relationship prevails or is presumed to prevail, and the other one, lacking this feature, is not. It is possible to hold that the genealogical grid can be distinct from all other aspects of kinship and that the boundaries of the system are those defined by the grid. These boundaries, for some but not for all, include the putative or metaphoric extensions of the genealogical grid. [ . . . J

The position I have argued both n pirn person is that M organs paradigm ii-\ and that no m atter how elegantly ^ ! been revised, amended, altered, em belli^i^c or tightened up, it does not do what itpum^I ; to do. I take it that Lounsbury and GoiE&i nough in the United States follow that digm, as well as Levi-Strauss in France, and Needham in England, and many othen/lfl^ do not mean this as an exhaustive list of j& 0 |l lowers of M organs kinship work, but dnly-fo^ suggest that it holds a position of preeminence"??r$ in the anthropological world today. Neitjief do I mean to suggest that the work of G d a h f^ enough and Lounsbury or any of these men 11 in any sense identical except that they'-a]j^ | follow M organs use of the genealogical grid as the basic analytic tool and they all remain wedded to M organs definition of what kin* f ship is all about.

M y criticism of M organs paradigm is 'M.; plainly contained in the alternative strategy I have followed. I have tried here to show its ; -V utility and productivity given my aims, object ives, and analytic procedures.

There is general agreement among all of us, followers of M organ as well as others, that a classification of kinsmen does not exhaust the kinship system by any means. Where we differ is in how we handle this fact. The position which follows from M organs paradigm, which Lounsbury, Goodenough, Levi-Strauss, Leach, Needham, and the many others whom I should mention take, is that the kin classification can be treated as a distinct, separate, and autonomous part of the kinship system, however it may be related to a larger system. Just as some anthropologists believe that the phonemic system can be analyzed apart from grammar and syntax in language, so these anthropologists also feel that the kin classification can be analyzed apart from the rest of the kinship system. M y own position is that an accurate account of the kin classification in a cultural sense (see below) cannot be given without taking the whole kinship system into account.

The second major part of the strategy I have followed is to ask what, in each and every

WHAT IS KINSHIP ALL ABOUT? 261

instance, the definition of the domain of kinship may be for each and every culture I study. I do not assume that this domain is defined a priori by the bio-genetic premises of the genealogically defined grid. In other words, where the followers of Morgan take it as. a matter of definition that the invariant points of reference provided by the facts of sexual intercourse, conception, pregnancy, and parturition constitute the domain of kinship, I treat this as an open, empirical question. Of what primitive elements, I ask in each and every case, is the cultural system composed? It is this question which on the one hand enables me to ask what kinship is all about, while on the other hand it seems to deprive me of an externally based, systematically usable comparative frame. I shall return to this point below.

The second major aspect of the strategy I have used follows directly from, and is required by, the third, which is the use of a different, narrower; and I think sharper and more powerful concept of culture than has been traditional in anthropology. Briefly, I start with concrete, observable patterns of behavior and abstract from it a level of material which has usually

' been called norms. The normative system ; | consists in the rules and regulations which an

actor should follow if his behavior is to be ^ . accepted by his community or his society as T,; proper. These are the how-to-do-it rules, as

;,Goodenough has recently put it (1970). They rj t^hbuld on no account be confused with the [^ patterns of behavior which people actually per- Nform. It is the rule thou shalt not steal that is

not the fact that many people do not ttl> itis the rule that a middle-class father

l^iould earn the money to support his family,$ the fact that many actually do. vTbenext step is to abstract from the norma-

what, following Parsons, I have tithe cultural system (Parsons 1966, }**This consists in the system of symbols ^nteanings embedded in the normative \but which is a quite distinct aspect of J&n easily be abstracted from it. By sym- wdrineanings I mean the basic premises ^culture posits for life: what its units jjPi how those units are defined and

how they form an integrated [^classification, how the world is struc-

i>>vhat parts it consists and on what

premises it is conceived to exist, the categories and classifications of the various domains of the world of man and how they relate one with another, and the world that man sees himself living in. Where the normative system, the how-to-do-it rules and regulations, is Ego- centered and particularly appropriate to decision-making or interaction models of analysis, culture is system-centered and appears to be more static and given, and far less processual (but only in contrast with the normative system of course; culture has its own processes and its own rules of change and movement). Culture takes mans position vis-a-vis the world rather than a mans position on how to get along in the world as it is given; it asks Of what does this world consist? where the normative level asks, Given the world to be made up in the way it is, how does a man proceed to act in it? Culture concerns the stage, the stage setting, and the cast of characters; the normative system consists in the stage directions for the actors and how the actors should play their parts on the stage that is so set.

This is not to say that the cultural and normative level are unconnected. The cultural level contains implications for the general directions in which normative patterns of action ought to take place, but it does not spell them out in the detail which the normative patterns themselves provide. The cultural premise that "there are two kinds of relatives, relatives by blood and relatives by marriage, does not tell how a man should treat his relatives by marriage. Yet once it is known that there are these two categories, how each is defined, and the values attached to each, general directions of action are laid out already even if they are not sufficient to provide a precise template for how-to-do-it. By the same token, the cultural premises allow a wide range of possibilities and alternatives in the normative rules.4

This conception of culture is far more narrow and, I think, far more precise than those generally in use in anthropology today. Furthermore, it is explicitly tied into a wider social theory rather than linked in a loose, ad hoc way to a variety of eclectically given and not always internally consistent theories. This conception of culture and the social theory of which it is a part yields a considerably smaller, more concentrated, and homogeneous body of

262 DAVID

materials abstracted as culture than many other definitions.

This leads to the final point in this introductory section. W hat kinship is all about is considered here only in its cultural aspects; it is kinship at a cultural level as here defined. I am explicitly not speaking of kinship at a psychological level. N or am I speaking of it as a system for the organization of social groups, that is, not at the social system, social organizational or social structural level, for these are, by my definitions, not the same as the cultural system. The cultural level is focused on the fundamental system of symbols and meanings which inform and give shape to the normative level of action.

This theory, like every other theory, is easily transformable into a series of questions which are put to the data. It assumes that every concrete act, or system of action, has a cultural component, a social system component, a psychological component, and so on. Thus the question I am asking, which follows directly from this theory, is: W hat are the underlying symbols and their meanings in this particular segment of concrete action and how do they form a single, coherent, interrelated system of symbols and meanings? If that question cannot be answered satisfactorily, there must be something wrong with my theory. If I can answer the question, it may at least show that the theory can be applied, even if it is not enlightening. I have followed this theory, however; not because it is merely applicable but because I think that it is enlightening and that we learn much from it.

M any other fruitful and useful questions can be asked about the same segment of concrete action using the same social theory. For instance, one can ask about the motivations entailed in that action. Or one may ask the history of that segment of action. A relatively common question in anthropology is sometimes called a comparative, functional question.5

The crux of the issue, then, is what is being compared. If we ask how any particular cultural system is constructed, for instance, we ask what units it contains, how they are defined in that culture, how they are differentiated and articulated as symbols and meanings; but if we pose a question taken from outside any particular socio-cultural system, this is different

from the cultural question. For in stance^ functional prerequisite to the maintenance any society to regulate sexual behavioi; tSj, unregulated sexual behavior is a source of djf'* ruption. We can then ask of each socio-culiuftjp system or society, H ow do they do it? ,^ - boundaries of sex and of the different recu tory mechanisms are defined in terms of relevance to the question and are related only loosely to the boundaries which the society itself embodies in its cultural constructs.'We may ask, for whatever reason, how the pro, cesses of human reproduction are ordered ^ different societies, and a study of certain aspects of their kinship system will of course be included; but the particular cultural cofy structs which obtain within that society are cut off or are included a t points determined by the relevance of that material to the question being posed and asked in a comparative framework from outside the bounds of the particular culture.

A cultural question is by definition a question of from w hat units this particular socio-cultural system is constructed, of how those units are defined and articulated, and of how those units form a meaningful whole. It is not true that such a question necessarily yields material which is unique, distinctive, and cannot be compared from one society to another. Quite the contrary. The systems of symbols and meanings of different cultures can be compared as easily as systems of human reproduction can be compared from one society to another.

I do not mean to play semantic games here or to beg fundamental questions; but if culture consists in the system of symbols and meanings of a particular society, and if a social system consists in the manner in which social units are organized for various social purposes, then comparative operations of the former are cross-cultural comparisons while, by definition, comparative operations of the latter are not cross -cultural comparisons but rather cross-social comparisons, that is, comparisons of social organization, social systems, or social structures. The key definitional difference lies between the concepts of society and culture, between modes of organization of action systems and systems of symbols and meanings.

I am concerned with questions of cross- cultural comparison and questions having to

W HAT IS KINSHIP ALL ABOUT? 263

do with the analysis of particular cultures, not social systems.

IIWhat happens if this analytic strategy is used on a particular kinship system? Does it tell us anything usefully new or different about that system or about the nature of kinship?

I have tried to do this for the American kinship system. Since much of this material already has been published (1968, 1969: 116 125, 1970:88-90), I will merely touch on the points which bear directly on the task at hand.

What anthropologists have heretofore regarded as THE domain of kinship in American culture turns out to be only one part of a larger domain, made up of two different parts. The domain we have traditionally called kinship is Ego-centered, consisting of a network of related persons, such as mother, father; brother, etc. It is not hard to see that this domain is constructed out of m any different kinds of components from many different systems. Thus each unit in the system, such as mother or father, is defined first by w hat might be called a pure kinship com ponent, second by an age or generation com ponent, third by a sex-role component, fourth by a class com ponent, and by other components of other kinds as well. Hence I have called this the conglomerate* system or the conglom erate level of the system.

;-To understand the second part we m ust go a - step further. We can, by using a level of contrast

which is not generally employed in kinship i analysis, abstract the kinship com ponent

alone and in its pure form from the conglomera t e system. We do so by asking w hat the dis

junctive features are which define the person as yj.^'jdnsman as against a non-kinsm an.6 W hen

|7 ^ c d o this, it becomes apparent a t the level of \.j^ j^ p u re system that the distinctive features or

defining features (1968:22, 41 ff.) o r the k ' |r ^ tive an^ irreducible elements are, first,

bio-genetic substance and, second, a % i l r ^ 0r con^uct^which I have characterized

enduring solidarity. These tw o elem- ^ f e n m b in e to yield three m ajor categories of I l l l l $ k en kQtk elements occur together the

relative is form ed; w hen the conduct elem ent occurs alone and

w ithout the shared bio-genetic substance element the category of relatives-in-law or relatives by marriage is formed; and, finally, when the shared bio-genetic substance is present alone the category of relatives in nature is formed. Hence at the pure kinship level the so-called kinship term s do not play a classificatory role.7

-If we consider the pure kinship system alone, we can see that the distinctive features by which it is defined are parts of two much wider and more general categories o f American culture. T hat is easy to see when we remember tha t blood relatives are considered to be related in nature and that they are parts of the natural order o f things as defined in American culture. Their second distinctive feature, the code for conduct, is simply part of that much wider category called the order o f law , defined in opposition to the order o f nature. This is the order imposed by m an on nature, the order defined in American culture as consisting in rules, regulations, customs, traditions, and so forth which m an, w ith the aid of hum an reason, creates. The limited dom ain of law in the juridical sense is only one p a rt of this w ider dom ain; and w hen we understand how m uch a part of the same dom ain they are, we have explained in some significant degree why relatives by m arriage are also called relatives in law.

A t the pure level, then, part of w hat an th ro pologists have traditionally been calling k in ship seems to be defined in A merican culture as an indistinguishable p a rt o f these tw o m uch w ider and m ore general cultural categories, the o rder of nature and the order of law.

If we now consider the dom ains of religion and nationality8 and analyze them as we have analyzed k inship , a ra ther interesting fact emerges. We again distinguish the pure system from the conglom erate system. The conglom erate system o f nationality consists in the entire federal and state systems; the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of governm ent; the tw o H ouses of Congress; the different states and their organization, and so forth . But to abstrac t the pure system we sim ply ask, W hat m akes a person a citizen? W h at are the distinctive features w hich define a persons nationality? H e is either born an A m erican o r he is - and the w o rd is o f course quite


significant - naturalized. Once again we find that the distinctive features are shared substance (being born American) and a code for conduct which enjoins diffuse, enduring solidarity: being a loyal American, loving ones country, and, in President Kennedys felicitous phrase, Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask rather what you can do for your country. The same is true, as I have tried to show elsewhere, for religion, where the conglomerate level includes the organization of the church and so forth; but what makes a member of the church is, once again, shared substance and a special code for conduct which can be characterized as diffuse, enduring solidarity (1969). [ . . . ]

If the conglomerate level consists in units made up of elements from different pure systems, then the question arises of how the different components relate with each other in the conglomerate unit. Are they simply added together? Do they form some special configuration?

The answer to these questions seems to be that at the level of the person, each pure component receives further specification of its content, defined now with reference to how a person should act, and this further specification derives from the total context or the interaction of all of the defining components.

Let me try to explain this by going back to the so-called kinship component once more. The kinship component says that persons are related either by shared bio-genetic substance, a shared code for conduct, or by both. But at the level of the person something called distance comes into play, so that the question is no longer shared or not shared but of how much is shared. If the shared elements are now conceived in terms of magnitudes, then class factors, personal factors, and a variety of other considerations permit it to be cut off at various points and at various times and under various circumstances and for various purposes at the option of the actor himself. Hence the common observation in both America and England that some people will actually trace blood connections to people, whom they then say they do not count among their relatives or kinsmen. They simply say, Yes, they are my blood relatives, I suppose, but I dont consider them relatives; they are too far away or words to that effect.

In sum, the difference between the? system and the conglomerate system ^their orientations. The conglomerate system^- oriented toward action, toward telling pS & ill how to behave, toward telling people ho w ^f^ do-it under ideal circumstances. It is thusin&^Scloser to the normative system. The Pure"';system, however, is oriented toward the stated of-being, toward How Things Are. It is in thjv^ transition from How Things Are and How Things Ought To Be to the domain of If Thai i; Is So, How Then Should One Act that the pufl^ v: systems come together to form the conglomerate systems for action.

At this point the question of just what h ' kinship all about or how the domain of kinship is to be defined must be raised. If, on the one hand, the broad categories of the order of nature and the order of law contain as special instances the two major components which are distinctive features out of which the categories of kin are formed, and if, on the other hand, at. the level of the pure system, the kinship system, the nationality system, and the religious system cannot be distinguished from one another in terms of their defining features, what justification is there for calling this system either a kinship or a religious or a nationality system? They are, culturally speaking or with respect to their distinctive features, all exactly the same thing.

And if it is true that at the level of the conglomerate system it is not possible to say that the kinship component is dominant and modifies the sex-role component, or the other way around, but only that each retains its integrity in the configuration, while a new, emergent level is formed, then it is equally problematic as to what, for comparative analytic purposes, any particular conglomerate system should be called. That is, if it is a kinship plus sex-role plus age-role plus class, system, why call it a kinship system? Oq for that matteq why call it a sex-role system? Is there one good reason why a particular bundle of components should be characterized by only one of its components rather than by another?

There is ONE good reason and that is when, in the particular culture we are studying, it is done that way. I can think of no other good reason.


This turns out to be the case in American in which they are embedded in that system asculture. As in modern Western European cul- well as the way in which they are articulated toture in general, there are clear-cut, formal div- the social system components at the normativeisions which are called in that culture itself level. The normative level thus includes moreinstitutions. These institutions refer precisely than those cultural elements in it. It followsto the conglomerate level - the family is one, therefore that the conglomerate level and thethe church is another (it may also be called normative system are at the same level of ab-religion), the state is a third, and so on. straction, but that the notion of conglomerate

Hence if our term kinship is synonymous is simply the identification of the cultural elem-with that institution as it is defined in American ents in their matrix of the normative system, culture, sometimes called family, then kin- To move to the pure cultural level, then, is to ship is indeed a valid cultural unit which is abstract distinct cultural domains apart fromactually found in American culture, and it is arid regardless of the normative matrix infound so that its defining features are at the which they are found. Thus one normativecultural level to be identical with those of reli- matrix containing certain cultural elementsgion and nationality while it is found to be very may be an institutionally distinct family systemclearly differentiated from those other units at in modern Western European society, but thethe conglomerate level and in its normative pure cultural domain is quite different as I haveaspects. N or should it be forgotten that, how- tried to show, and the same cultural elementsever kinship, nationality, and religion are dif- can be found in a variety of other differentiatedferentiated at the conglomerate, organizational normative systems as well (such as religion, thelevel, the very same distinctive features which moral community, etc.). To distinguish the con-

define all three as cultural domains are them- glomerate level, then, is simply to locate theselves an integral part of the orders of nature cultural elements in their place in the norma-and law. That is, we have simply not explored tive system and to be able to analyze them inthe entire universe of American culture and so relation to each other and to the normativewe cannot as yet say what other units should system which contains them,fall into the same cultural category with kin- Let me conclude this section by repeating ship, nationality, and religion or, to put it in that as anthropologists we can study differentthe other way, whatever other categories ex- cultures or we can study different socialhaust the domains of the order of nature and systems. If we study different cultures we dolaw. Thus there are grounds for accepting not do the same thing as when we study differ-Parsons suggestion that education ought to be ent social systems. When we study differentconsidered along with kinship, religion, and cultures we study different conceptual schemesthe moral community (nationality) as part of for what life is and how it should be lived, wea single cultural entity. My purpose here, how- study different symbolic and meaningfulever^ is not to introduce a new element but to systems. We do not study the different ways

1 remind the reader that we have approached in which different theoretically defined func-1 American culture rather as the blind men ap- tions are actually or ideally carried out. There1 proached the elephant. Even if we have dis- is thus a major difference betweencultural| covered that a leg is linked to the body, we anthropology and what has been called,I have not gone much further and cannot claim following British usage (and quite correctly,1 to have examined American cultural categories too) social anthropology or comparative soci-\ exhaustively. This is a very important point to ology. I take my task to be the study of culture1 which I shall return. and identify myself as a cultural anthropologist1 vi.In introducing the terms pure and conglom- (although I will be the first to admit that thisI pate I confine their meaning to the cultural has not always been so).

i;|r. !*Vel and speak only of cultural components. Given this definition of the task, we can1 ;. ?! is clear that the pure level is confined to the proceed. Even if kinship is culturally segre-: .cultural level alone. The conglomerate level gated as a domain at one level of American; ^jould be understood as the cultural elements culture - the conglomerate or normative level" ( V.^nbedded in the normative system and the way - it is not culturally segregated as a distinct

266 DAVID M. SCHNEIDER , ; iS

domain in most of the cultures we encounter outside the Western European culture area. Quite.the contrary. The vast majority of other cultures we know do not have culturally differentiated domains of the sort which occur in Western European or American culture.

But note clearly what I am trying to say. I do not mean that we must cease to observe domestic arrangements in different societies; I do not mean that we cannot ask how a people order their relationships between men and women or between a woman and the child she bears; I do not mean that we cannot go out and ask for the theories of procreation which a particular people hold. We can do all of these things and more and have learned much from such questions. I mean only that such questions of organization, or social organization, or social structure should not be confused with or identified with questions about the nature, the structure, or the content of either particular cultures or of culture in general. Because domestic arrangements can be an analytic category which may not correspond to anything as it is defined as a cultural category in a particular culture, the relationship between a woman and the child she bears may be an analytic category which we erect for various reasons, but it may or it may not correspond to any particular cultural category in a particular culture; theories of procreation may be an analytic or functional category which we invent but which may or may not have one or another cultural counterpan in a particular culture, or be incorporated indistinguishably into one or another cultural scheme in a particular culture. It may indeed be true that some culture does have, as a cultural category, domestic units, but that needs to be shown empirically, not assumed so simply on one theoretical ground or another.

There is one final point. I have said that the American kinship system has two distinctive features, shared bio-genetic substance and diffuse, enduring solidarity. I have said elsewhere that these derive from the master symbol of coitus and that each is a facet of this act. The last few pages of my book, American Kinship, make the point that the biological elements have symbolic significance. They constitute an integrated set of symbols in the sense that they are a model for how life, in certain of its

aspects, is constituted and should bet|i The symbols are biological in the sense^^ the culturally given definition of the system is that it is derived from the biology as a process of nature itself. But fundamental to our understanding th a t^ W ? preciate that these biological elements are'syjj|f|t bols and that their symbolic referents are biology as a natural process at all.9

Now one may well ask if in a somewlut'- .^fl roundabout way I am not saying here what Morgan and his followers have always said,' - II for they too stressed genealogy as a biologically 0 defined network, and descent can easily be seen as shared bio-genetic substance, the whole . '~l being treated in its social rather than in biological aspects. I think that I am saying . j something quite different. First, although , i what appear to be biological elements seem to '! be present in both Morgans analysis and mine, we treat those elements in very different ways.l j- insist that these biological elements have primarily symbolic significance and that their meaning is not biology at all. Morgan and his followers have insisted that it is the biological elements of human reproduction as they are scientifically demonstrable in nature which are directly reflected in kinship and that it is these facts which people have slowly, over time, learned to recognize more or less accurately and then give further social value. For Morgan the matter stopped there; but for1 many of his followers, like Rivers, Malinowski, and some of our contemporaries, the biological elements need not rest on the scientifically determined or actual facts of nature but merely on whatever the natives believe to be the facts of human reproduction. Thus whatever their theory of procreation, it is the fact that these are believed to be true facts of nature and it is therefore in terms of these biological, or hypothetical facts of nature, that kinship is defined.

Whether it is the true facts of human reproduction or only those which the natives happen to believe to be true, human reproduction in its biological aspects plays the fundamental role for Morgan as well as for the functionalists who follow him. For both, the socio-cultural position of kinship is similar. For Morgan, it was an achievement of great evolutionary significance when the classificatory system gave


way to the descriptive system, for it showed not only that man had achieved the most advanced form of the family but had also achieved an advanced level of knowledge, for the descriptive system was founded upon correct appreciation of the distinction between lineal and several collateral lines of perpetual divergence of the latter from the former (1871:142). A formal arrangement of the more immediate blood kindred into lines of descent, with the adoption of some method to distinguish one relative from another and to express the value of the relationship, would be one of the earliest acts of human intelligence (1871:10).

For the functionalists of Malinowskis school the situation was not much different except that the evolutionary material was excised with gusto. Kinship was the social recognition of biological facts, and the presence and function of a socio-cultural system of kinship was explicable and understandable precisely on the ground that these facts constitute elements in the external environment with which man must cope directly as well as indirectly and to which he must adapt. His way of coping with them and adapting to them is, by definition, the kinship system. The family, a part of the kinship system, was seen by Malinowski as, among other things, one way of maintaining order in the sexual sphere, for it provided rules and regulations governing sexual relations and these, when obeyed, were orderly and permitted man to proceed with his life in an orderly fashion and without disruptions and the chaos that would be attendant on unregulated sexuality.

( As I have already indicated, I too am a functionalist and I too have a functional explanation to offer, though it is somewhat different from Malinowskis or his co-workers.

No one can disagree that man must cope t . with the facts of life and the facts of nature, f. whether he knows what these facts are scientific ically or has only erroneous beliefs. It can be

demonstrated easily that the question of how :V;' man copes with the facts o f human reproduc- |c '' ; kQn is answered only in part, and in very small 'X. Part at that, by the kinship system. But that is |X; not the main point here at all. The main point i v ^ere is that that is a social system question, a

T Urological question. It is a question of how coles are defined and articulated into a set of

patterns for action which adapt man to the facts of his environment.

A different functional question centers on the cultural rather than the social system level. That question has to do with the system of symbols and meanings which the so-called kinship system embodies, with what the boundaries of that sub-system of symbols and meanings are and whether they stretch beyond the kinship system or only fall within a portion of it. The functional question at the cultural level, then, is what that system of symbols and meanings consists in and, once that is answered, what part it plays in the total socio-cultural system. ( . . . ]

III

In section I, I drew a distinction between culture and social or normative system and said that this distinction had an important place in a wider social theory, essentially Parsonian in conception.

The fundamental point of section II was that at the cultural or symbolic level, kinship, religion, nationality (pending a full clarification and revision of this term), and possibly education as well are identical, although they are quite different in their social system or social organizational aspects.

In sections I and II, I emphasized that the question asked of the data is different, depending on whether it is a cultural question or a social system or social organizational question.

The next problem, and the problem of this section, is the old one of how comparison can be conducted on a cultural level if it is assumed that each and every culture may be uniquely constituted. How can one compare wholly different things?

In part, the answer to this question has been given in the discussion of the differences between culture and social system. The units of any particular culture are defined distinctively within that culture. By definition, they cannot be imposed from outside. It follows, therefore, from the definitions and the theory used here, that there is and can be only one cultural question, the question of what its particular system of symbols and meanings consist in.

We must start, of course, as adults who have lived in our own society and been socialized in


our own culture before we even imagine any others. Thus we start by asking that question and answering it for our own culture, which always serves as a base-line for cross-cultural comparison. W ithout some comprehension, however botched, distorted, biased, and infused w ith value judgments and wishful th inking, both good and bad, our own culture always remains the base-line for all other questions and comparisons. In part, this is because the experience of our own culture is the only experience which is deep and subtle enough to comprehend in cultural terms, for the cultural aspects of action are particularly subtle, sometimes particularly difficult to comprehend partly because they are symbols not treated usually as symbols but as true facts. So it is difficult at times to convince an American that blood as a fluid has nothing in it which causes ties to be deep and strong. So, too, many aspects of culture are unconscious and are no t part of an explicit scheme of things.

A more fundam ental reason for the fact tha t our own culture is always implicitly or explicitly, immediately or remotely, the base-line for com parison and comprehension is that that is w hat anthropology is all about. It is an attem pt to understand ourselves as hum an beings by using anthropology as the m irror for man. By seeing ourselves against the contrast of others and by seeing others in contrast with ourselves, we learn about ourselves and about m ankind.

It is unnecessary to raise the old problem of how it is possible for two things to be com pared as wholes when each is wholly unique. We are spared this burden by the fact tha t the basis for com parison is given by our definition of culture as a system of symbols and m eanings. Symbols and meanings can be compared just as easily as modes of family organization, the roles of seniors to juniors, or the methods of agriculture. The comparative base is given therefore by the theoretical stipulation of w hat it is we are trying to abstract from each system and from the fact tha t we can indeed systematically abstract the system of symbols and m eanings for each society. Hence the key to the comparative problem is in locating the symbolic elements from a careful analysis of the units which the culture itself defines. We do not say, Lets look at the lineages, we ask instead w hat units this culture postulates, and the

answer may have nothing whatever to/'iU' with lineages. We m ust then follow these bolic elements throughout the particular cup ture, wherever they may lead and in whatever^ forms they may be found. In short, fram ing^ question is the first step. It must then answered for our own culture as an hypotheaijjjS One then takes those cultural constructs ahii asks if any other culture has anything like it 0}'% not, how they differ, where and in what way; vi. and where they appear to be the same.

Let me conclude and summarize by returning p.' to M organ and company. I think it is quite clear v that this is no t in fact w hat M organ and hi* _ - followers have actually done. Their cultural ' categories do no t come from a previously ana- '/ lyzed culture a t all, but are composed of ad hoc:- elements which derive from social system ques-~ tions, functional questions, and from (in M organs case especially) evolutionary considerations, all of which are quite foreign to any particular culture. M organ did not use the cultural system of American kinship as the model for his com parative analysis because as I have shown in American Kittship, the genealogical grid which M organ used is not part of that system. M organ is quite clear tha t what he took to be the com parative model as the many quotes cited a t the outset of this paper show, is the genealogically defined or biologically defined netw ork. By using the genealogically defined grid M organ and his followers have protected themselves from finding out w hat the true units of American kinship in a cultural sense are and w hat their distinctive features actually are. In other words, they have not dealt w ith American kinship as a cultural system but have simply assumed that their model caught or contained some part of it.

I have affirmed repeatedly that the genealogically defined grid is no t appropriately applied to American kinship for three reasons. First, it does no t in fact correspond to the cultural units of which the American kinship system is actually made up, nor to the distinctive features in terms of which these cultural units are defined, unless, of course, the results of the research presented in American Kinship are largely in error. Second, the genealogically defined grid is tied to the false assumption that it is possible to discover the classification of


kinsmen w ithou t taking into account the rest of the k inship system, particularly the system of roles and patterns fo r behavior as well as the wider cultural context in w hich the k inship system is situated. Third, as M cLennan was first to po in t ou t and as only a few since have m aintained, is the false assum ption tha t the so- called kinship term s are either the sole avenue through w hich the classification of kin can be established o r constitute a m ajor or decisive body of evidence on th a t problem .

One m ight raise the question of whether, perhaps, the Am erican k inship system is unique in that it is the only one in the w orld where the genealogical grid is inappropriate for cultural comparison. I am sure th a t you will agree tha t this does no t seem to be so. I can assure the reader tha t from my own w ork on Yap, the Mescalero Apache, and the Z u n i . . . the genealogically defined grid does no t fit these cultures either. I w ould suggest tha t the N u er cannot be fitted to a genealogical grid, nor m ost of the Eskimo systems we have adequate inform ationon.

The im portan t p o in t is tha t the genealogically defined grid is the only analytic device that has been applied to m ost o f the systems which anthropologists have studied. There has been

. almost no system atic a ttem pt to study the ques- V^-tion without em ploying this device. To put it

simply, it is ab o u t tim e th a t w e tested somevVS; other hypotheses. [ . . . ]

IV

a f ^ a r e ready now to deal w ith the question ;; "'if *Which is the title o f this paper: W hat Is Kinship -pAbout?

MwThe answer is sim ple and self-evident by now. %Kjnship is an analytic category w hich has been ^Prevalent in anthropology since M organ first

iented it. In the w ay in w hich M organ and Mowers have used it, it does n o t corres- J o any cultural category kn o w n to m an.

sclosest thing to it is the W estern European jgory of family, bu t if I am correct in my Mis even that is no t close. F rom the begin- |othis paper I have p u t the w ord k insh ip

in order to affirm th a t it is a theoret- Uon in the m ind o f the an thropologist

i no discernible cultural referent in

I have consciously misused the term kinship simply as a way of beginning the discussion. But it is no longer necessary to misuse the words; now we can use them correctly. Kinship is w hat M organs, G oodenoughs, Lounsburys, Levi-Strauss, Leachs and N eedham s (among others) analytic schemes are all about, but they have no known referent in any know n culture except at the conglomerate level o f Western European culture, as in America. To speak precisely, the title of my book, American Kinship , is a misnomer. I really did not deal extensively with kinship at the conglomerate level nor did I intend to; in the pure culture level there is no such thing as kinship. Hence my use of the term pure kinship level is w rong, too, which I have tried to suggest by the use of quotes around the word. The level is the pure culture level as defined by certain symbols.

Let me conclude this section on a simple note. For a while anthropologists used to write papers about Totemism as if it were a concrete or conceptual entity that had an actual, existential counterpart in the cultures o f the Australian" aborigines, am ong others. Goldenweiser and others then demolished th a t notion and showed that totemism simply did not exist as a useful analytic category precisely because it had no corresponding referent in any of the cultures with which it was alleged to be associated. It became, then, a nonsubject. In due course Levi-Strauss wrote a book about th a t non-subject, in which he first explained th a t it was a non-subject and therefore could no t be the subject o f the book, for it did no t exist outside the minds of those who invented it and believed it, and these were anthropologists, no t the natives they wrote about. The matrilineal com plex suffered the same fate in the hands of Lowie.

In m y view, kinship is like totemism, m atriarchy, and the m atrilineal com plex. It is a non-subject. I t exists in the minds of an thropologists bu t no t in the cultures they study. If you like to think tha t I have devoted a good p a rt o f my intellectual life to the industrious study o f a non-subject, you are more than welcom e to do so. If you think tha t I have now talked m yself ou t of a subject for study you are quite right, roo. But th a t is not the whole story.I have talked myself o u t o f studying kinship as


if it were a distinct, discrete, isolable subsystem of every and any culture. What I have learned and have tried to convey here is that in the study of culture one must proceed in a very different way.

When I started to study American kinship I went to households to talk with the inhabitants about how those who were living there were related to each other and to others who were not living there. I systematically collected genealogies at the very outset. When I began to discover that their concepts were somewhat different from those which traditional kinship studies led me to expect, I followed their concepts and their definitions and the formulation of the cultural domains of their actions, depending as well on my own experience over the past years here in America, on Yap, and among the Mescalero Apache. Once that was done, and it was not easy for me to do it systematically, I could see that there was no such thing as kinship, except as it existed as a set of a priori theoretical assumptions in the mind of the anthropologist.

One must take the natives own categories, the natives units, the natives organization, and articulation of those categories and follow their definitions, their symbolic and meaningful divisions wherever they may lead. When they lead across the lines of kinship into politics, economics, education, ritual, and religion, one must follow them there and include those areas within the domains which the particular culture has laid out. One does not stop at the anthropologists arbitrarily defined domains of kinship, religion, ritual, and age-sets, etc., but instead draws a picture of the structure of a culture by means of the categories and congeries of units which the culture defines as its parts; one interrelates these in terms which, in that particular culture are symbolically defined as identical, drawing distinctions among parts which that culture itself defines as different by their different symbolic definition and designation.

Proceeding this way, a somewhat different analysis emerges than when one asks questions about the social system or the social organization. Yet the two systems, as I have said all along, articulate and are related to each other. Ultimately the study of culture can no more be isolated from all other sub-systems of a society

than the study of its social system, alth^. this is the way we have been proceeding past, largely neglecting or omitting the stuArr omitting the studculture or relegating the idea of culture tokinds of hats the natives wear or, correspofj|i?i % ingly, to the level of arts and crafts itig M S

i j r i - T Sachieved. [ . . . ] *

:i l IV ft S B fi

I will try to briefly summarize this paper andf^l f' what I take to be its major points, and add point in conclusion. '^ 1 1

Theory suggests that it may be useful systematically and rigorously distinguish cut~.: ture from social system, defining culture rathir w f 5 narrowly as a system of symbols and meanings. - When this view of culture is applied tolfO what have ordinarily been treated as kinship systems, new material emerges because i new question has been asked about it. Instead of the classic question which is at the social y.'i system level of How Does This Society Organ- ;- ize to Accomplish Certain Tasks (establish alliances, maintain control over territory, provide for inheritance and succession, hold and transmit property, etc.), a cultural question is asked: namely, what are the units, how are they defined in the native culture itself, how does it postulate their interconnections, their mode of differentiation, by what symbolic devices do they define the units and their relationship, and what meanings do these have?

I tried to give an example, briefly condensed from published literature, of what happens when a particular kinship system is analyzed in this way, using my own work on American kinship, and I think I was able to show that some rather new and different results emerged.

One of the lessons derived from this study of American kinship was that the very same symbols defined kinship, nationality, and religion at the cultural level and that, if this were so, then all of these - with the possible addition of the educational system in American culture could be included in one single cultural unit or domain. Hence there need be - there could be - no grounds for distinguishing the kinship system from the religious system, from the nationality system, from the educational system at the cultural level.


Further, where the bio-genetic elements, the elements of conception and parturition were taken simply as defining elements or were treated as states of affairs with which every society must cope in one way or another; the alternate strategy of study which I commended yielded the suggestion that these defining elements of blood, of one flesh and blood, of bio- genetic identity could be understood as symbols which stood for social relationships of diffuse, enduring solidarity. That is, the biological elements which previous theories took as merely defining features, givens in the state of affairs, could be understood better as symbols for kinds of social relationships, and probably these did not derive from, not stand for; the biological material they purported to order functionally. Indeed, at many points the scientific facts sharply contradicted the cultural facts about biology; but the fact that the scientific facts had little or no discernible effect on changing the cultural facts seemed good evidence for concluding that the bio-genetic elements in American kinship were primarily symbolic of something else and hardly relevant to biology as a natural or actual state of affairs.

The next step in the argument was simply to generalize from that fact. Kinship, from the dme of M organ, had been defined in terms of consanguinity and affinity, that is, by an a priori set of criteria, and studied with respect to the organization of its elements for discharging certain functions. If kinship is studied at the cultural level, however, then it is apparent that kinship is an artifact of the anthropologists analytic apparatus and has no concrete counterpart in the cultures of any of the societies we studied.

Hence the conclusion that kinship, like totemism, the matrilineal complex, and matriarchy, is a non-subject, since it does not exist any culture known to man.

I then tried briefly to show that even those | who seemed to have broken with the Morgan

tradition - Rivers, Leach, Needham, and Levi- Strauss - were still ensnared in that tradition flther by their commitment to genealogical cri- na in the definition of kinship or by their ^romitment to the positing of questions purely

the social system or social organizational *^*1 or both. I used Lounsbury and Good-

enough as examples of those who were without question squarely in the tradition of Morgan.

And finally, embedded here and there in the paper is the plea to try, for a change, another approach to kinship, another set of hypotheses, to ask another question and see what the payoff might be. We have asked these functionally defined, social organizational questions of kinship exclusively since the 1870s. There is no need to stop asking those questions for they are good, productive, legitimate questions. I only urge that we ask a different kind of question, a cultural question, as well.

In conclusion, if the argument of this paper has any merit, it follows that it will no longer be possible to study kinship or religion or economics or politics, etc., as distinct cultural systems, for in each case the definition of each of these domains has been in social system or sociological and not cultural terms. This has been the classic Weberian approach,10 where the basic frame of reference is the institution, socially or sociologically defined, and the two different questions, one organizational and the other cultural, are then put to the data. (Indeed, one of the favorite Weberian questions of recent times has been of the effect of religious organization and its cultural aspects on the development of the economic system.) The result of this Weberian approach is a fragmentation of the cultural material into artificial segments which remain unlinked and unlink- able. It is not possible to relate the cultural aspects of the religious system to the cultural aspects of the kinship, political, or economic system without extraordinary skill and good luck, if it is possible at all.

If the argument I have presented here is followed out logically it will be necessary to treat the whole culture as a single cultural system, following out its different segments and its different divisions and domains as these are defined and differentiated by the symbolic system itself.

It follows from the irreducibility of the cultural to the social systems, or vice versa, that this examination of the cultural system as a whole, apart from its social system aspects, is necessarily undertaken independently of any examination of the social system, at least in its initial phases. Ultimately, of course, as the Parsonian theory of action makes so clear,


these all come together and are mutually interdependent parts of any concrete system of action, but they are analytically distinct. As no one system can be reduced to any other each system therefore has an integrity of its own which must be respected by the analytic procedures used.

It is precisely this failure to distinguish the social system aspects from the cultural aspects and the primary analytic emphasis on the social system to the neglect of the cultural that has led us - the descendants and followers of Morgan - into such untenable conclusions as I have tried to deal with here - that because in some sense genealogy and procreation and conception are really out there as indisputable and unavoidable facts of life it is and it must be the material out of which kinship systems are made.

To my mind it will no longer be acceptable to consider religion as a cultural system any more than it would be acceptable to consider kinship as a cultural system or politics as a cultural system. Each culture must be approached apart from its institutional segments, its social organizational segments, or its social structural segments, and from a purely cultural perspective. Once the cultural system as a whole is outlined - at least in its more or less broad oudine, with its major symbolic features defined and the links between them roughly established then, and only then, can such questions be usefully raised as, for instance, the role of the culture of a given society on its economic development, its religious organization, or its political system. But I would stress the importance of undertaking cultural analyses which are truly and clearly independent of the sociological analyses and uncontaminated by them. This is not the place to elaborate this last point but only to make clear that if the analysis of this paper has any merit, then the independent study of the culture of a society as a whole culture must be undertaken apart from and uncontaminated by the study of its social system.

NOTES

1 I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the helpfulness and the many useful suggestions of Dr. Priscilla Reining, the fact that

Mr. James A. Boon was kind enough toSj' the first draft of this paper when my hcattr- prevented me from doing so, for Me. Bhofc many useful suggestions and criticism^ ?---' well as those of Mr. Carlos Dabezies, andfc! the long and useful letters on the first draft jv this manuscript written me by Mr. MicjjjJ Silverstein, Dr. Paul Kay, Dr. Roy dAndrai Dr. Edmund Leach, Professor Claude Lhj. Strauss, Dr. Ward H. Goodenough, an| Dr. Judith Shapiro. In addition, I would moj: tion again my seminar on Culture Theory of spring, 1971, the students in the Department of Anthropology who heard and discussed the first version of this paper; making many helpful suggestions, and the students at the Uni' versity of Minnesota who also listened patiently and made acute and perceptive dt servations and suggestions which I have incorporated without further, more specific acknowledgment.

I Unless, of course, one takes the position that marriage is necessarily entailed in the notion of descent and therefore all that is needed is one single component, parenthood,

i One of the best contemporary statements of this position is contained in two papers by Ernest Gellner, 1957 and 1960. Parenthetically, I should note that the cultural system can be abstracted either from the normative system or directly from the level of observable behavior, for it is a distinct aspect of each. Methodologically the situation may be such that it is easier to abstract the cultural material from the normative system, and 1 think that this is often true. Furthermore, it is a useful methodological device to treat the normative system and the system of observed behavior as relatively independent sources of material - they cannot be completely independent, of course - so that the cultural material abstracted from the normative system can be checked against the cultural material abstracted from the patterns of concrete behavior. If these two sources do not yield the same cultural material, the analyst is alerted to the fact that he has a problem on his hands, for if every cultural premise is embedded in the normative system, and the normative system plays a role, though by no means the only or even the decisive role, in concrete action, then the cultural aspect ought to appear in both and not only in one area. Finally, it should be noted that some parts of


the cultural system are constructs o f the observer which deal w ith implicit, covert, or unconscious categories while others can be formulated directly from the natives own, explicit m odel itself. For further discussion of these points see my American Kinship (1968), especially Chapter One.

5 All questions are really functional. W hen the question deals with the relations between the parts under given conditions it is a structural question. W hen it deals w ith the relations between parts taken over a period o f time and with reference to their change and interaction, then the question is processual. H ence the popular term structural-functional is a fundamental misunderstanding as well as a misnomer. Since all questions are functional, some structural, and som e processual, then all questions are either functional-structural or functional-processual, and it is a mistake to call a kind o f theory structural-functional. See Parsons (1970) on this point.

6 I cannot think o f a single work on kinship which has system atically done this. Instead, the assumption is made that consanguinity and affinity define kinship and, therefore, if a bond of either sort can be show n to obtain, then by definition those are kinsm en. This is a good example o f the difference between asking a social from a cultural question. The externally given criterion, a definition o f kinship taken from outside the culture, is used rather than a definition o f kinship elicited

jy .i'


10 Of which C .. Geertz (1966) is a clear example. Schneider (1968) also starts from such an institutional beginning but does not attempt to relate the cultural and social system aspects, only to isolate the cultural aspects.

R e fe r e n c e s C ited

Geertz, C. 1966 Religion as a Cultural System. In Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. ASA Monographs 3:149.

Gellner ^ E. 1957 Ideal Language and Kinship Structure. Philosophy of Science 24:235-242.

1960 The Concept of Kinship. Philosophy ofScience 27:187-204.

Goodenough, W. H. 1970 Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology. Chicago: Aidine.

McLennan, J. F. 1886 Studies in Ancient History. Comprising a Reprint of Primitive Marriage. London and New York: Macmillan.

Morgan, L. H. 1871 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Vol. 17 of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. (First printed 1870.)

Parsons, T. 1966 Societies. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

1970 Some Problems of General Theoryin Sociology. In Theoretical Sociology.

J. C. McKinney and E. A. Tiryakiam'Jp* New York: Crofts.

1971 The System of Modem Sodetl^ i>lEnglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. InjjJfSfjs

Schneider, D. M. 1965a Kinship and Biology. Aspects of the Analysis of Family Structure.A. J. Coale et al., Eds. Princeton: Princeton * University Press, pp. 83-101.

1965b American Kin Terms and Terms for ..Kinsmen: A Critique of Goodenough* Componential Analysis of Yankee Kinship Terminology. In Formal Semantic Analyst E. A. Hammel, Ed. American Anthropologist 67(5, pt. 2):288-308.

1965c The Content of Kinship. Man 108i122-123. ' j ' : 0

1965d Some Muddles in the Models: OnHow the System Really Works. In The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology. London: Tavistock, pp. 25-85.

1968 American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

1969 Kinship, Nationality and Religion. IForms of Symbolic Action. V. Turner, Ed. Proceedings of the 1969 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, pp. 116-125.

1970 What Should Be Included in a Vocabulary of Kinship Terms? Proceedings of the VIII International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Tokyo 2:88-90.

what is kinship all about[edicao redigitalizada]

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